Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

Web Intents is a new project designed to solve the problem of web application integration. Inspired by Android's intent system, it allows developers to build features without needing to integrate with every possible 3rd party service. Web Intents lets users choose their preferred service for actions like image editing or sharing. The project has been revised with a simplified API to make integration easier for developers, requiring minimal code. Service registration is done via a new tag, and client initiation is also streamlined. Check out the examples at http://examples.webintents.org/ and share your thoughts as we work with Mozilla to refine this game-changing approach to web development.

This post discusses how to use window.name for cross-domain communication between windows/iframes, especially before the onload event. It explains a simple method using window.open to set the name and retrieve it in the opened window. It also addresses IE compatibility issues by base64 encoding/decoding the data and provides code snippets for both encoding and decoding, handling IE's character restrictions and lack of built-in base64 functions.

WebMessaging (postMessage) seems simple but has quirks. Different browsers handle data differently (structured clones vs. strings). The biggest problem is sending messages to a newly opened window/iframe. You can't just send a message immediately; you have to wait for the window to load and signal back. This adds complexity, requiring the new window to postMessage back to the opener, which then sends the actual data. A workaround involves passing data via window.name, but this has security implications as the data's origin is uncertain and the name persists, potentially exposing data.

I found and fixed a bug in WebKit! My LeviRoutes framework needed to simulate 'onpopstate' events for testing, but WebKit's createEvent(\"PopStateEvent\") was broken. After some digging in the WebKit source code, I found the problem in Document.cpp, added the missing PopStateEvent handling, created a test case, and submitted a patch. It got reviewed and accepted! Now my fix is part of WebKit, used by tons of people, and I can finally get back to LeviRoutes.

I love the HTML5 History API, it makes developing applications with a consistent URL scheme across server and client super simple, however it doesn't come without its problems. When developing the [LeviRoutes URL routing](https://github.com/PaulKinlan/leviroutes) framework it became obvious that we need some changes to the specification as-is. The [Mozilla documentation](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.onpopstate) reports that onpopstate is called whenever the history object changes, unfortunately this is not the case, and is not the case with the spec either, the [HTML5 Spec](http://www.

Whilst developing our latest app (https://github.com/PaulKinlan/ioreader) for a Google IO, we ran into several large is limitations with AppCache and HTML5 History that I wanted to share (and at somepoint hopefully solve). Putting the current discussion of the issues with AppCache aside for a couple of minutes, there is no provision in HTML5 History to include pages "pushStated" into the current App Cache Group Consider this flow: We have a multi paged app with pages A and B when rendered from the server sharing the same AppCache and thus in the same group.

I have mixed feelings about SVG. I find it complex and requiring specific tools, and its integration with the web is clunky. It feels like a context switch between HTML and SVG DOM. However, SVG is scalable, vector-based, and has powerful graphical capabilities like filters and paths, enabling things not possible with regular web technologies. I wish path could be a CSS property, simplifying its usage and allowing text or even block elements to be rendered along a path. This would be more efficient than embedding SVG within HTML elements.

At Google I/O 2011, we showcased a mobile web app. Many asked about its development timeline. Work began on March 3rd, with core coding starting on March 25th. While the calendar time was just over a month, the effort was spread across four engineers, each dedicating about 20% of their time to their respective UI using the FormFactorJS framework. This setup facilitated isolated development, with the flexibility to inject custom code per form factor and a common base controller in controller.js. We also developed and leveraged two frameworks, LeviRoutes and FormfactorJS, to efficiently consolidate common logic and specialize the controller according to form factors.

At Google IO, we were asked how to optimize Google Fonts for mobile performance. We focused on visual appeal by using mobile-friendly fonts like Droid Sans and Lato. To minimize requests, we leveraged App Cache, storing the CSS and font files for faster subsequent loads. While the Web Font API abstracts URLs, we found the font URLs within the CSS response and cached them. Although subsetting fonts is possible, we didn't use it given the potential character range needed for news articles.

Another question that we didn't get to answer in our talk - Mobile web development: Zero to Hero - is basically the premis of the entire talk. We believe that in a large number of cases that it is entirely possible to build applications using one semantic document structure, a large swathe of common core logic whilst specializing for a given formfactor. From our talk, you can see that the User Interface is optimised for smartphone, tablet, desktop and TV - we believe that there are qualitatively different user interaction patterns in each form that it is important that you optimise for the different experiences, but for the developer experience it is not easy (or possible in some cases) to keep having to build one new app for each category of device that you want to target.